On 7 July, the much-anticipated victory of the far right Rassemblement National (RN) in the French legislative election did not happen.
Macron had called the snap election a month before following the high score of the RN in the European elections – which act in France as a kind of mid-term election and barometer of the public’s will. All polls pointed to the RN’s emergence as the first force in French politics – with a few predicting an overall majority in the National Assembly. With no coalition having secured an overall majority, the French legislature is now divided into three blocs: the left alliance, the Macron or bourgeois bloc, and the far right. This spells an end to Macronism, and his promise to move the country beyond left and right.
Macron, who has run France with a minority government since his re-election in 2022, was in a difficult position in June. His previous Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne barely survived several no-confidence votes, and there were clear signs that the last party of opposition to be reluctant to bring the government down, Les Républicains, was going to change its votes in the legislature. Macron jumped before he was pushed – and attempted to take his opponents by surprise. He is quoted as saying that he ‘threw a live grenade’ at the feet of his adversaries, catching them off guard with snap elections no-one was ready for. The left, split among four main parties, and having just fought a bitterly divisive European election campaign, would surely crumble under these conditions.
But to everyone’s surprise, the left united, creating a new popular front (Nouveau Front Populaire or NFP) in just five days to meet the deadline for candidates to run in each of France’s 577 parliamentary constituencies. Macron’s gamble failed: he had hoped to ally with some of the centre-left parties after the election, but the left’s united front includes bitter rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose firebrand style of left-populism is incompatible with an alliance with Macron and his allies. Macron campaigned hard to liken Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise (LFI), to the far right, grouping the two parties under the label ‘les extrêmes’.
This is Macronism in a nutshell: the belief that you can unite the centre left with the centre right and have a wide coalition ranging from the Socialists to the Republicans. This promise of Macronism is not quite believable: Macron’s economic policies were always to the right of the political spectrum, and though he had some early social policies that were more to the left, they quickly made room for a more conservative politics. But Macron was at least partially successful electorally: he took many votes and seats from the left in 2017 and repeated the same strategy on the right in 2022. This strategy had already cost him his parliamentary majority at the legislative elections in 2022, but the Fifth Republic is designed to run with a weak parliament, and he pushed through his reforms without a majority since.
This is the flip side of Macronism: the belief that even though his electoral base is relatively small (never beyond 20–25 per cent of the electorate), he can push through his vision irrespective of the costs. The pensions reform, a highly unpopular change to retirement conditions, was widely perceived as an attack on the working poor. It disproportionately affected those who have not had a university education and started work early in life. Many of those have now turned to the RN for answers, as they have been denied the benefits of Macronism.
Although the RN didn’t secure its place as the first party in the 2024 Assembly, it still gained seats and has momentum ahead of the 2027 presidential elections. By attempting to move beyond left and right, Macron has consolidated the far-right vote. He was elected twice against the far right but has not delivered a politics of compromise and reconciliation which he promised in his victory speeches in 2017 and 2022. Macronism has failed in its main task: to make sure the far right does not get closer to gaining power.
Macronism has also failed on the left. It has invigorated and united an otherwise divided left. It took a lot to get the socialists and LFI back together – Mélenchon once quit the party of Mitterrand with great fanfare over European Union membership. The new left alliance may still be fragile, but it has shown it can propose an alternative to Macronism. In the conclusion to my book in 2022, I looked to the future and argued that the left had an opportunity to react if it could propose something else than Macron. Macron had built his ideology on the notions of security, merit and hope – the core tenets of Macronism. The left could propose other virtues for its politics in the 21st century.
Instead of security, with its focus on policing and punishment, the left could propose safety, as an economic defence of a welfare state. Instead of merit, and the resentment it creates among the losers of globalisation, the left could propose democracy, and reinvigorate the French republic through constitutional reform. Instead of hope, and the dangers of unfulfilled promises, the left could foster solidarity to unite otherwise disparate movements and protect the vulnerable. Time will tell if the NFP lives up to those ideals, but it now has a unique opportunity to move past both Macronism and the nationalist bloc’s rise in power.
Charles Devellennes is Senior Lecturer in Political and Social Thought at the University of Kent.
The Macron Régime by Charles Devellennes is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £80.00.
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